


But When I Reach For You

by artform_virtue



Series: To Love is to Grow and Other Life Lessons [2]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - No Murder Mystery, Angst with a Happy Ending, Betty Just Feels a Lot, Betty is Upsetty, Cuddling & Snuggling, Established Relationship, Everybody Lives and Everybody is Happy, F/F, F/M, Fighting, Fluff and Angst, Foursome - F/F/M/M, Jughead Jones Does His Best, Kevin is a Good Friend, Kissing, Lack of Communication, Love Letters, Multi, Nicknames, OT4, POV Third Person Limited, Polyamory, Relationship Problems
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-06
Updated: 2018-02-06
Packaged: 2019-03-14 12:26:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13590030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artform_virtue/pseuds/artform_virtue
Summary: Betty, Archie, Veronica, and Jughead have their first real fight. Betty hurts and they all learn.





	But When I Reach For You

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Supercut" by Lorde.  
> 

The blare of Veronica’s alarm jars Betty from a deep sleep bright and early Sunday morning. Once awake she immediately feels too hot and too cold all at once. Her naked body is pressed between Veronica and Jughead, the latter having stolen most of her blanket.

 

The alarm gets louder and Veronica fumbles her phone off of the floor to turn it off.

 

“Uuurrgghh,” Archie groans comically.

 

Jughead rolls over to lie across Archie’s chest, muttering, “Please be quiet, babe.”

 

Now that Jughead has really stolen her blanket, Betty crawls over her girlfriend to get out of bed. She’s so tired she can barely see straight.

 

They’d been up until almost sunrise having sex, which was of course fun at the time, but as Betty totals the hours of sleep in her head, she ends the count at four.

 

“What are you doing, B?” Veronica asks, her eyes still closed.

 

“I told you last night when you set the alarm,” Betty replies, rifling through the clothes on the floor to find her wrinkled skirt and sweater from the night before, “I have to go to church with my family.”

 

“Nooo, Betty,” Archie whines, displacing Jughead as he sits up.

 

Betty is so tired that every nerve in her body feels like a fork being scraped along a dinner plate. She wants to cry, scream, snap at Archie, all of them for keeping her up so late. But Archie looks so pitifully handsome with his bedhead and pouty lips. She steps over the shoes and boxer shorts on Veronica’s bedroom floor to kiss her boyfriends’ foreheads. She leans over them to peck Veronica on the cheek and then makes her way towards the door.

 

“We love you Betty,” Jughead calls after her.

 

“I love you all, too,” Betty replies without turning around, shutting the door softly behind her.

 

Once home, she sneaks into to her own bedroom and changes into a clean pair of everything. She’s doing her best to cover up the bags under her eyes with makeup when her mother calls her and her sister, asking if they’re ready to go. Normally, Betty would be worried about her mom noticing her sneaking in and out at odd hours, but lately Alice has been so wrapped up in work that she hardly takes the time to tell Betty and Polly apart.

 

“Fun night last night?” Polly asks her teasingly as they descend the stairs.

 

Betty is silent for a beat. “A late night, at least.”

 

“Everything okay?”

 

“Girls! Your father is waiting in the driveway!”

 

“I’m fine, Pol,” Betty lies.

 

The whole ride to church Betty repeats and recounts her mental to-do list: _ACT prep, English essay, calculus worksheet, French take-home quiz._

 

Between the football game on Friday and date night on Saturday, Betty let the whole weekend (along with the whole week, the whole month) get away from her.

 

As she settles into a hard wooden pew with her family, her phone begins buzzing continuously. She sits through the whole service with it vibrating against her thigh. Her mother shoots her a dirty look every other time it goes off, but Betty can hardly be bothered: she has to put all her energy into staying awake.

 

When the service finally ends, Betty checks her phone to find almost a hundred texts—all from Jughead and Archie playing Gamepigeon in the group chat. Betty grits her teeth, wanting to scream. Polly asks her once again if she’s feeling okay, but Betty just brushes her off, being ruder than she means to.

 

Betty is crawling into bed not a minute after they return from church, silencing her phone and falling asleep almost instantly.

 

She wakes up that afternoon to even more text messages: more Gamepigeon, and shirtless pictures of Archie, and Veronica asking what they want to do for _next_ week’s date night, like this week’s hadn’t just ended.

 

**Archiekins: I’m pretty sure Reggie is throwing a house party next Saturday if you guys wanna go**

**Juggy: Let’s just get high and have sex**

**V: Jug you ALWAYS want to get high and have sex**

**Juggy: Are you trying to tell me that those aren’t always the best date nights?**

 

Betty puts her phone down without answering and does her homework straight through dinner.

 

The next day at school, Archie scares the living hell out of her as she gathers her books from her locker after lunch.

 

“BOO!” he shouts, pinching her sides.

 

“Archie!” Betty cries, slamming her locker door shut. “What the fuck!”

 

Archie just laughs, leaning in to kiss her, but Betty stops him with a hand on his chest.

 

“Oooohh,” a couple of Archie’s football friends drone from where Betty hadn’t noticed they were standing, watching Archie embarrass her.

 

“Betty?” Archie asks worriedly, concerned look and puppy dog eyes suddenly appearing. “What’s wrong?”

 

“Nothing,” Betty says hurriedly, taking her hand off of Archie. She glares at Reggie when he laughs. “I have to get to class.”

 

She hurries off to calculus without so much as a second glance back at her boyfriend. She finds an empty classroom to study in at lunch, and ignores the texts she gets from her partners asking where she is. For some reason, Betty doesn’t care that they’re worried.

 

By the time she gets home she feels sick to her stomach with how dysphoric she is. Her mother has been taking time out of her busy schedule to pressure both Polly and Betty to search for colleges and the stress is eating Betty alive.

 

After dinner Veronica calls her.

 

“What’s up?” Betty asks in way of answering the phone.

 

“Whoa, Betty baby, slow down there, I just want to chat with my girlfriend. How was your day?”

 

Despite Veronica’s “just wanting to chat” the whole conversation feels like an interrogation, and it just makes her angrier. She hangs up as soon as possible, feeling horrible like she was mean or cruel to Veronica in some way, and goes to bed early.

 

That night, she dreams of her partners. They’re at Disney World, riding her favorite ride, Splash Mountain. Except she’s sitting next to Jughead and he’s acting like she doesn’t exist. He refuses to hold her hand and will only talk to Veronica and Archie.

 

After they get off the ride they emerge from the park into Riverdale. Betty wants to go to Pop’s, so they walk all the way there just for the other three to decide they don’t actually want to go inside.

 

“We’ll just wait out here for you, Betty,” Archie says, but for some reason Betty knows she can’t trust him, so she says it’s okay even though it hurts like he’s stabbed her in the stomach.

 

Then, Veronica insists they hurry back to Disney World to make it in time to meet someone. There is no name, but Betty knows and dreads the person. When they finally get back to the amusement park, there is a doctor waiting next to a haunted house to tell them that Jughead has cancer and only weeks to live.

 

Veronica and Archie both start crying and Veronica screams at Betty that this is all her fault. Somehow, Betty knows that it is and breaks down, apologizing, but no one can even hear her.

 

She wakes up crying, heart cracking open in her chest.

 

Betty retrieves her phone from her nightstand and picks out Archie’s contact from her favorites, thinking he’ll be able to comfort her. The phone rings and rings, and as soon as she hears his voicemail, she hangs up.

 

Logically, Betty knows that it’s the middle of the night and that she is only tired and disoriented. But as she lies there crying herself to sleep, no matter how many times she tells herself that it was just a dream, that Jughead is okay, that nothing is her fault, she just can’t seem to believe it.

 

***

 

The next morning, Betty finds Jughead at his locker before class starts and hugs him as tight as she can.

 

“Not that I’m complaining, obviously, but what’s this for, B?” Jughead asks, rubbing her back.

 

“I just feel like I haven’t seen you in a while,” Betty mumbles into his sweatshirt.

 

“Hey, babes,” she hears Archie’s voice from behind her. He pecks Jughead’s lips and then Betty’s neck. Betty pulls herself away from Jughead to wrap her arms around Archie’s middle.

 

He holds her snugly and without question, starting a conversation with their boyfriend about Fortnite.

 

They eventually begin walking to class, Betty in between the two of them, her arms linked through theirs.

 

“Jones,” Cheryl greets Jughead, materializing out of nowhere like she always does, “the information I promised you on the honors program at Northwestern—from my father himself.”

 

“Oh,” Jughead replies, accepting the stack of paper, “thank you, Cheryl.”

 

Cheryl gives them her usual quasi-judgmental look in reply and disappears. The time comes when they should resume walking, but they stay put, Betty still staring at the packet in Jughead’s hands.

 

“I didn’t know you were looking at Northwestern,” she says simply.

 

Jughead and Archie exchange a look, so Betty looks up at Archie, too, like he’s the one with the explanation. “Did you?” she questions him.

 

“Well,” Archie begins, looking between his boyfriend and girlfriend, torn, “yeah, I guess I did.”

 

“Listen, Betts—” Jughead begins, but Betty cuts him off.

 

“It doesn’t even matter, right? This shouldn’t even be a big deal. Except Archie knows, and I’m guessing Veronica does too, and this whole thing involves dealings and promises with the _Blossoms_ of all people, and—”

 

“Betty—”

 

“And I’m just not allowed to know?” Betty raises her voice over Archie’s consolation. A few heads in the hallway turn. “I’m your girlfriend and Cheryl knew all about your fucking Midwestern hopes and dreams before I did. Great.” She punctuates the end of her explosion with an eye roll and storms off to class on her own. Archie and Jughead don’t even bother to follow her.

 

Once she gets to French, she texts Veronica about what she is both dying and dreading to know.

 

**Betty: Did you know Jughead was applying to Northwestern???**

**V: Yes but Betts I promise it’s not a big deal :-( it’s not even his top pick you know that**

Betty bites her tongue to keep from crying because if Veronica knows about the fight that means Archie and Jughead told her about it behind her back in the same secret group chat where they probably discussed Jughead’s Northwestern application.

 

She pushes it all out of her mind for the rest of the school day, determined not to let her partners even cross her mind. When she gets home that afternoon she realizes she’s on her period, that she must have PMSing for days now, and the thought makes her sick. Having no control over her emotions makes her sick.

 

She feels lonely and disjointed, like she’s been shoved into a dark room blindfolded with her hands tied behind her back and an hour to escape.

 

***

 

“So then Moose tries to tell me he’s straight. After everything we just did! At first I thought I had heard him wrong, but—Betty? Betts, are you listening?” Kevin asks.

 

Betty tears her eyes away from where she had been staring blankly out the Kellers’ front window. “Yes, Kev, of course. Moose is in denial about liking boys.”

 

Kevin half-smiles at her and sets down the pen he’d been waving around in the air. “Are you alright? You’ve seemed a little off this past week. You haven’t sat with us at lunch recently, either.”

 

Betty sighs, dropping her head onto her folded arms. “That’s because Archie, Veronica, and Jughead have been sitting with you.”

 

“Uh oh,” Kevin says, sounding genuinely concerned but trying to keep his tone lighthearted. Betty doesn’t deserve him as a friend. “Trouble in queer polyamorous paradise?”

 

Betty sucks in a breath, contemplating confiding in Kevin. He is close with all four of them, after all. But Betty knows that for all the gossiping he does, he would never betray her trust.

 

“We’re sort of…in a fight, I guess.” Once Betty says it she realizes that this has never happened to them before. There have been arguments and disagreements, but nothing they couldn’t work out in a few minutes with one of them acting as mediator.

 

Kevin covers one of her hands with his own, nodding sympathetically.

 

“I haven’t spoken to them in two days.”

 

At this, Kevin appears genuinely shocked. “Two days? Betty, seriously? I thought you four were like, sewn together at the hips.”

 

Betty groans. “I know, Kev. It honestly feels like it’s been two weeks.”

 

“And you haven’t tried talking to them?”

 

Betty shakes her head. “Archie has sent a few things in the group chat, but no one responds.”

 

“Now that you mention it, Jughead wasn’t at lunch yesterday. Veronica and Archie were kind of quiet, too.”

 

This surprises Betty. She was upset with her significant others (and herself), sure, but she never thought it would have affected their relationships with one another.

 

“Fuck.” Betty drops her head back down. “What have I done?”

 

“I’m sure there’s no permanent damage. You just need to talk to them and work things out.”

 

“You’re right, but—I don’t know. I’ve been acting like a child. I’m so embarrassed.”

 

Kevin rubs her back. “It’ll work out, Betts. I promise.”

 

Betty leaves Kevin’s after they finish their French project. She’s greeted by the smell of her mother’s cooking and her sister’s sunny attitude, which helps her feel better, at least for a little while. She makes it as far as dropping her backpack next to her desk before she notices the sign outside of her window.

 

Taped to Archie’s windowpane is a piece of loose-leaf that with _Betty, please talk to us_ written on it Veronica’s slanted cursive.

 

It makes Betty want to cry, so she shuts her curtains immediately.

 

When she opens her locker Friday morning, Betty notices a folded piece of notebook paper sitting between her calculus and biology books. She opens it and reads _Dear Betty_ scrawled in what she knows to be Jughead’s handwriting. The letter goes on to delineate her boyfriend’s apology, and there is no telling how long in has been sitting at the bottom of her locker.

 

She pays hardly any attention to her classes that day, focusing on thoughts of her partners instead. She knows she needs to communicate with them, she just doesn’t know how.

 

***

 

That night, Betty sits on her couch watching _Mamma Mia!_ and eating raw cookie dough. That week’s football game was stormed out, so she’s enjoying her time off from the Vixens and trying to ignore how depressingly lonely her life is. Her parents are out to dinner with business associates, Polly is with Jason, and Kevin is with Moose, despite all his internalized homophobia. But she guesses that’s what she gets for dating and then fighting with her three best friends.

 

Thunder booms loud enough to shake the house, and Betty has never been scared of thunderstorms, not even as a child, but the loud noise makes her jump.

 

The knock on the front door that comes almost immediately after startles her even more.

 

She gathers her wits, sets down the tub of cookie dough, and goes the answer the door.

 

On the other side of it stands Archie Andrews, rainwater dripping from his hair and grey t-shirt clinging to every muscle on his torso.

 

“Archie?” Betty asks, just a little less than completely shocked. Car doors slam in the distance and Jughead and Veronica make their way up to the porch as well, significantly less damp and sharing an umbrella. “What are you guys doing here?” she says even as she opens the doors wider to let them inside.

 

“We had to see you,” Veronica answers.

 

“We tried to give you space, but—”

 

“We couldn’t let you pull yourself away from us, Betty,” Jughead finishes.

 

She looks at them all and feels like crying.

 

“We love you,” Veronica declares, stepping forward to hold Betty and kiss her deeply. Betty is still too shocked to react properly. “And I don’t care if you’re mad anymore. We’ve always worked things out together before, and this shouldn’t be any different.”

 

“I just—” Betty begins, but Jughead cuts her off with a kiss.

 

“Hey I want a kiss, too,” Archie complains, moving in closer.

 

“Arch,” Betty tries to say, but then he’s wrapping a strong arm around her waist and kissing her with his whole body, as Jughead like to say. He even lifts her off the ground.

 

Betty has to catch her breath afterwards and it doesn’t help that’s she’s giggling helplessly. “Archie, you’re soaking!”

 

“I feel like I haven’t kissed you in forever,” Archie says, grinning.

 

Betty’s heart pangs and she blushes from the guilt. “I’m so sorry, you guys. Jug, I didn’t see your note right away. I’ve been in an awful mood all week, and took it out on you, and then things just got out of hand.”

 

“No, Betty, I should have told you about Northwestern,” Jughead insists. “I didn’t mean to leave you out like that, I swear.”

 

“I believe you.” Betty smiles at him.

 

“It doesn’t matter now,” Veronica says softly, linking her arm through Betty’s and grabbing Jughead’s hand. “What matter is that we’re all here now. Together.”

 

“And that Archie is leaving a puddle of rainwater on my mother’s hardwood floor,” Betty adds.

 

Archie laughs, looking down at himself. “Betts, I was just so excited to see you,” he admits, leaning in to kiss her again.

 

“My turn,” Jughead says after they part. Archie turns to kiss him full on.

 

“I feel like I haven’t kissed you in forever, either,” he mumbles against their boyfriend’s lips.

 

“What happened with you guys while I was M.I.A.? Kevin told me Jughead wasn’t at lunch the past few days,” Betty wonders as she leads them upstairs to get Archie a towel.

 

“I…may have snapped at Jug and told him that what happened was his fault,” Archie confesses, blushing.

 

“But I forgave him,” Jughead says.

 

“Just like we forgive you, B,” Veronica states. “Always.”

 

“I really am sorry, you guys.”

 

“It’s okay, Betts,” Archie insists, hugging her from behind.

 

“Thank you Archie, but I really am wet enough already,” Betty says with a laugh, wriggling out of his damp grasp. She goes into the bathroom to retrieve her towel for him, thinking that she was planning to do laundry soon anyways.

 

“Archie kissed you, what, twice, and your already wet? You must have really missed us, baby,” Jughead jokes, making Betty roll her eyes and Archie laugh.

 

“I’ll get you some dry clothes,” Betty says as Archie towels his hair. She pushes open the door to her bedroom and the other three follow her in.

 

Veronica lies down horizontally on Betty’s bed and Jughead sits her desk chair, manspreading in the way that Veronica hates to admit is attractive. Archie pulls off his wet shirt to dry his torso and Betty loves the way they all look in her bedroom, like they belong.

 

She digs through her dresser for a t-shirt of Jughead’s she commandeered long ago and the biggest pair of joggers she owns.

 

“You can put your other stuff if my hamper if you want. I’ll get it back to you later,” Betty tells Archie, handing him the dry clothes and sitting on the bed next to their girlfriend.

 

Jughead snorts a laugh. “Oh, please. Knowing these two girls you won’t get your clothes back for months.”

 

Veronica laughs and Archie grins at him. “Tell me about it,” he says as he shucks off his jeans.

 

Once Archie is in dry, warm clothes he jumps onto Betty’s bed next to Veronica, kissing her on the neck softly. Betty lies down on Veronica’s other side and reaches out her hands for Jughead. “Juggy, c’mere,” she mumbles.

 

He stands and stretches like it’s a great inconvenience, but then says, “Anything for you,” and climbs onto her bed on Archie’s right side.

 

“I missed this,” Veronica states, eyes closed, a small smile on her face.

 

“Me too,” Betty agrees, propping her head up on her hand to look at them all.

 

“So, since the game is canceled,” Archie begins, “does that make tonight date night?”

 

“Does that mean tomorrow we can get high and have sex?” Jughead asks immediately, making Veronica giggle.

 

Betty says, “Let’s just start with tonight.”

 

Jughead nods. “Alright, in that case, I seem to remember seeing some cookie dough downstairs.”

 

“And _Mamma Mia!_ ” Veronica adds.

 

“Last one there has to sleep on an edge tonight!” Archie exclaims, shooting up and dashing downstairs. Jughead isn’t far behind him, shouting, “Not on my watch, Andrews!”

 

“They do both know that they’re the only two who really like sleeping in the middle, right?” Veronica asks.

 

Betty laughs so hard she can’t even remember what being mad at them felt like.


End file.
